John Rhode and Miles Burton | Series Detectives
By Miles Burton: The Secret of High Eldersham and The Shadow on the Cliff
| The Milk-Churn Murder / The Clue of the Silver Brush | Death in the Tunnel
| Death Leaves No Card | Death in a Duffle Coat
By John Rhode: The Murders in Praed Street
| The Davidson Case / Murder at Bratton Grange | Pinehurst / Dr. Priestley Investigates
| Dead Men at the Folly | The Motor Rally Mystery / Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap
| The Claverton Mystery / The Claverton Affair | Poison for One
| Death in the Hopfields / The Harvest Murder | They Watched by Night / Signal For Death
| Night Exercise / Dead of the Night | Death Invades the Meeting
| Vegetable Duck / Too Many Suspects | Death in Harley Street
| The Secret Meeting
By Cecil Waye: Murder at Monk's Barn
Shorter Works: The Elusive Bullet | The Yellow Sphere
| The Purple Line | The Vanishing Diamond
| Death Travels First
| Sixpennyworth | Ask a Policeman
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
John Rhode / Miles Burton
Recommended Works:
Murder at Monk's Barn (1931)
Dead Men at the Folly (1932) (Chapters 1 -7, 15, 16, 20)
Death in the Hopfields / The Harvest Murder (1937) (Chapters 1 first part, 3, 5 first part, 7-9, 17) (available on-line at
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015063959442)
They Watched by Night / Signal For Death (1941) (Chapters 1 - 5, start of 6, 13)
Night Exercise / Dead of the Night (1942) (Chapters 1 -4, end of Chapter 5, Chapter 9)
The Shadow on the Cliff (1944)
Death in a Duffle Coat (1956) (Chapters 1-4, end of 16)
Dr. Lancelot Priestley short stories
- The Elusive Bullet (1931)
Short stories
- The Yellow Sphere (1938)
- The Purple Line (1950)
Ask a Policeman
- Death at Hursley Lodge (1933)
Plays
John Rhode and Miles Burton
Cecil John Charles Street wrote mysteries under a number of pseudonyms, especially John Rhode and Miles Burton.
What is best in Street's writing? My favorites so far fall into two groups:
- Books with good mystery plotting: Murder at Monk's Barn, Dead Men at the Folly,
Death in the Hopfields, Death in a Duffle Coat.
Some uneven books have some decent mystery subplots: The Murders in Praed Street,
Poison for One, Vegetable Duck.
- Books with vivid, inventively detailed accounts of rural Britain during World War II:
They Watched by Night, Night Exercise, The Shadow on the Cliff.
The play Sixpennyworth is a comic variation on this subject.
Commentary on John Rhode / Miles Burton includes:
- John Rhode is one of three writers explored in depth in Curtis Evans' book
Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012).
- Tony Medawar wrote an informative study of his four mysteries as Cecil Waye.
- Nicholas Fuller's survey article on Rhode/Burton with links to his many reviews at
The Grandest Game in the World.
- TomCat's articles are at
Beneath the Stains of Time.
- David Vineyard's article on The Secret of High Eldersham is at
Mystery*File.
- Mary Reed's article on The Secret of High Eldersham is at
Mystery*File.
- Francis M. Nevins' article on The Claverton Mystery is at
Mystery*File.
- Francis M. Nevins' article on Dead on the Track, Men Die at Cyprus Lodge, Vegetable Duck is at
Mystery*File.
- William F. Deeck's article on Dead of the Night is at
Mystery*File.
- Bill Pronzini's & Newell Dunlap's article on Miles Burton from 1001 Midnights has been reprinted
(with permission) on-line at Mystery*File.
- The John Rhode page
at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, has a bibliography and links to many reviews.
Series Detectives
As "John Rhode", the author wrote a long series about Dr. Lancelot Priestley,
a retired mathematician who assists his friends at Scotland Yard with solving crimes.
As "Miles Burton", he wrote another long series about amateur sleuth Desmond Merrion
and Scotland Yard policeman Detective Inspector Henry Arnold.
Dr. Priestley somewhat resembles Jacques Futrelle's earlier sleuth
the Thinking Machine. Both are elderly scientists of enormous brain power and reasoning gifts.
Both are dry, somewhat snappish men, whose sometimes caustic manner conceals a kind heart.
Both frequently send the young men who assist them out on errands and leg work: the Thinking Machine
is assisted by young newspaperman Hutchinson Hatch,
while Dr. Priestley has his secretary and son-in-law Harold Merefield to help him.
Both Hatch and Merefield are nice, friendly young men, who are often baffled about the point of the puzzling errands
on which the Thinking Machine or Dr. Priestley send them, but who execute their tasks faithfully.
Dr. Priestley's character is that of a snappish old grandfather, the
sort of character fantasy writer E. Nesbit burlesqued as the Psammead in
Five Children and It (one of my favorite titles).
The Secret of High Eldersham and The Shadow on the Cliff
Rhode also published novels under the pseudonym Miles Burton,
usually about wealthy investigator Desmond Merrion. Two of these
share much common imagery: his first Merrion book, The Secret
of High Eldersham (1931), and The Shadow on the Cliff
(1944). Merrion is an ex-Navy Intelligence Officer, and he always
loves being on boats. So does his man Norwood. Norwood does sleuthing too,
and is fantastically helpful, in the tradition of such sleuth-servants as:
These writers are all in the Realist school, or the Bailey
school that partially derives from it.
The Shadow on the Cliff has a good Background of English
country life. It focuses not on the country homes of the rich,
but a more working to middle class environment: farms, country
inns, fishermen, and the countryside itself. Rhode liked stories
set in small villages. He also had a fondness for settings of
pubs, typically as places where dirty work was done in small communities.
Rhode liked hired hands as characters. These include assistant
innkeepers, farmhands, and factotums on country estates. Such
people take part in a network of relationships in his villages.
They also tend to be ignored by other Golden Age writers, so they
gave Rhode something original to write about. Rhode likes to suspect
higher ups: in Ask a Policeman, these are at the highest
strata of English society; in Cliff and Eldersham,
they are the local authority figures and rich people. There is
a distinct strand of anti-authoritarianism in his personality.
Rhode's characters get around by a great variety of transportation;
unlike other realist school writers, he liked old fashioned kinds
like horses and buggies, as well as wheelbarrows and dollies.
Rhode likes scenes in church graveyards. People often work at
night in Rhode: Gruber in his workshop in Cliff, the farmers
in Eldersham, the many pub keepers in his books, the soldiers
in Night Exercise. Although they often stay up all night
detecting, Rhode's characters crave sleep more than anything.
Rhode also liked nocturnal settings. He was fascinated by lamps
of all kinds, flashlights, the moon, and any other source of illumination.
He is very good at describing both moonlight and fog.
In his stories the detective often seems to stay in the same room
previously occupied by the murder victim, an odd approach not
found in many other modern writers, even sleeping in the murder
victim's bed. In his first novel, The Paddington Mystery
(1925), the hero actually discovers the corpse in his own bed
and bedroom. One can find some precedents in Victorian writers:
in Volume 1, Chapter 13 of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's
Lady Audley's Secret (1861 - 1862), the detective hero
who is tracking the fate of his missing, probably murdered best
friend and roommate, falls asleep on his friend's bed, and has
a memorable dream about the detective search he is on. Similarly,
Robert Louis Stevenson's "The
Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk" (1878) in
New Arabian Nights has a scene in which the protagonist
finds a corpse in his bed. Stevenson read Braddon's book as a
teenager, and it made a deep impression on him.
H.C. Bailey's characters like sensory
stimulation, from strongly flavored foods, flowers, bright colors,
and religious rituals. The many quotes in his stories, often from
songs and hymns, also bombard his characters with music and poetry.
I can identify with Bailey's characters - I share all the same
enthusiasms listed above. By contrast, Rhode's like tobacco, alcohol,
drugs, meat and the sea. This is much harder for me to identify
with: I have never smoked, drinked, used drugs or gambled, and
am definitely NOT an addictive personality, unlike many of the
characters in Rhode.
Rhode's men love to disguise themselves. The disguises tend to
cover his men's heads, and enlarge them; there is clearly something
phallic about such imagery. While some men are emphasizing their
phallic characters with their disguise, the witch cultists in
Eldersham are uniformly dressed in women's clothes, both men and
women, according to witch tradition. This gives an androgynous
effect. All of the imagery in Rhode, whether substances or disguise,
tends to a transformative quality. Characters wish to change their
identity or nature, especially at night.
Rhode's heroines tend
to be androgynous. Mavis in Eldersham is a Tomboy, drives
speed boats, and is called more like a boy than a girl by one
of the characters. The stepmother in Cliff manages the
estate. The heroine of Cliff is a Naval Officer, a Wren,
and wears a uniform. Her aunts are single women who run a farm,
do much heavy labor, and dress in mannish work clothes. Feminists
will like these gutsy characters, but feel sorry that they never
get to do any amateur detection. By contrast, women who show traditional
femininity are treated with contempt. These include the overdressed
Mrs. Gruber in Cliff, and the society woman in Eldersham.
These ladies don't work and are dependent on men. They are rotten
to the core, in Rhode's world view.
Rhode liked to include elements of small time crime in his plots,
especially dealing with the illegal sale of meat by farmers. This
allows for plot complication, and also establishes a certain air
of raffishness and disrespect for law among his villagers. Although
the killing of farm animals is a constant in Rhode's world, it
has sinister overtones. It is often linked to overtones of human
sacrifice, for example, through parallelisms in the plot (Eldersham)
or surrealistic imagery (Chapter 7 of Cliff). There are
stone altars in both books with hints of human sacrifice: the
pagan altar in the grove in Eldersham, and the natural
rock Tregeagle's Bed in Cliff.
The Shadow on the Cliff shows Rhode's skill at plotting
a fairly complex story, and having all the pieces dovetail properly.
Rhodes contributed the superb opening section of Ask A Policeman,
setting up the plot, the murder, the characters and their movements
and motives. He didn't do any more, as befits the first chapter
of a round robin. In some ways, Cliff is also all set-up
material. It is pure mystery storytelling all the way through,
and pretty well done. There is little "fair play" or
great creativity with puzzle plot in the Agatha Christie
sense. At the end of the story, we learn one of the characters
did it, but there is no especially creative mystery puzzle idea
in the solution. There is also little detection by any classical
definition. The detectives learn things mainly by being told them
by witnesses. Eventually, the detective gets a theory, which seems
to be right. The solution continues the good storytelling of the
rest of the novel by a well told account of the crime. It is most
pleasant to read, but more as a piece of storytelling than for
superb revelations. The passivity of the detective is mirrored
by other characters. The author creates an excellent spunky heroine,
and then nearly drops her from the novel's second half. The young
hero of the story also almost disappears.
The Secret of High Eldersham (1931) is one of those mysteries
that degenerates into a thriller. It starts out with a murder
mystery, but by the end of the book all focus on this has been
lost. This is too bad, because much of the book is well written.
Chapters 12 - 16 form a separate section, largely dealing with
the river and a mystery thereon. Rhode's detective Merrion eventually
solves this mystery, uncovering an ingenious criminal scheme.
Both the river navigation and the criminal scheme show the influence
of Freeman Wills Crofts. Merrion's romance
with Mavis, fears that her father is involved with the crime,
and desire to protect her family from the authorities recall the
amateur detective hero of Crofts' The Pit-Prop Syndicate.
Similarly, the spies' communication scheme in The Shadow on
the Cliff seems Croftsian.
Both Eldersham and Cliff start out in a pub, then
move on to an outdoor setting in the English countryside. This
setting, a river in Eldersham and a cliff in Cliff,
is described with full Golden Age devotion to landscape architecture.
Although no maps are included in the books, one could easily draw
a map of both settings. Rhode loved landscape. The landscape literally
speaks out at the end of The Shadow on the Cliff, in a
way that reminds one of the modern theories of J. G. Ballard.
The Milk-Churn Murder / The Clue of the Silver Brush
The novel known as The Milk-Churn Murder (1935) in Britain and
The Clue of the Silver Brush in the US, is a minor and episodic novel, not one of Miles Burton's better books.
Milk-Churns and Mystery
Its opening recalls The Cask (1920) of Freeman Wills Crofts:
- The Cask opens with a body found mysteriously in a harmless looking cask;
The Milk-Churn Murder begins with a body found mysteriously in a similar large container,
a milk-churn at a rural dairy.
- Both the cask and milk-churn are normally used to transport goods.
The Cask gives a book-length analysis of the shipping business, and how it transports casks and other objects in commerce;
The Milk-Churn Murder opens with an account of how dairy farmers and dairies use milk-churns to ship milk.
Long before The Milk-Churn Murder, famed magician Harry Houdini did a trick
during his London tour, where he escaped from a locked milk-churn. This is also a possible
ancestor of the novel's "body in a milk-churn" imagery.
Rural Economy: Food Production
Both the dairies and farmers are strictly rural, giving The Milk-Churn Murder a rural twist.
It is one of many Miles Burton and John Rhode books to explore rural life and work.
One can see parallels with his later farm-set novel Death in the Hopfields:
- The opening of The Milk-Churn Murder gives a brief account of the operation and economics of running a dairy farm,
anticipating the more in-depth look at farming in Death in the Hopfields.
- The milk is produced on farms, then sent to a dairy for processing in The Milk-Churn Murder;
the hops are grown on farms, then sent to an oast house for drying in Death in the Hopfields.
Both the dairy and oast house are technological environments.
The dairies are explicitly referred to as "factories": an instance of the author's interest in factories in the countryside.
The opening of The Milk-Churn Murder seems to be set in Somerset county in the Southwest of England.
It is just off the railway line from Taunton in Somerset, to Westbury just across the border in
neighboring Wiltshire county.
Death in the Tunnel
The novel originally published as Death in the Tunnel (1936) in Britain and
as Dark Is the Tunnel in the US, has recently been republished
in both countries as Death in the Tunnel, its original British title.
Likely Death in the Tunnel is the name by which it will be known everywhere in the future. That is fine:
Death in the Tunnel is a better title, and one that more accurately describes the book's contents.
The Tunnel
The best parts of Death in the Tunnel are those that describe and investigate the tunnel murder
(Chapters 1, 2, start of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). These tunnel sections are all in the first half of the book.
While not at classic level, these sections combine such positive features as:
- A description of 1930's railways.
- The landscape and architecture of the tunnel (part of the Golden Age interest in landscape and architecture).
- A reasonably ingenious mystery about how the crime was committed in the tunnel.
I figured out most of the tunnel mysteries immediately following the book
providing the chief clue (near the end of Chapter 6). So the solution to the mystery,
does not seem especially well-concealed or surprising.
One should not overrate the tunnel mystery. It's based on plot ideas
that make interesting reading, but which are not overwhelmingly clever.
Various railway workers are either witnesses to the crime, or help the police
during the investigation. These workers are given bits of characterization,
recalling the many worker-witnesses in Freeman Wills Crofts novels.
The railways and tunnel aspects can be considered a Background.
Signal lights, used on the railway in Death in the Tunnel,
return (in a a different context) as a mystery subject in They Watched by Night.
How-Done-It
The tunnel mystery is a kind of how-done-it: a mystery in which the physical details
of how the crime was executed are hard to determine, figure out or explain.
The majority of how-done-its focus on a hard-to-discover murder method.
Death in the Tunnel is different: its murder method is a straightforward shooting,
understood immediately by the police. Instead what is hard-to explain in Death in the Tunnel
are subsidiary aspects of the crime. SPOILERS.
These subsidiary aspects are the mysterious signal lights, and how the killer entered and left the tunnel.
These are finally figured out and explained by sleuth Desmond Merrion (Chapter 9).
BIG SPOILERS. The criminals' use of a breakdown-lorry with crane-and-tackle
(what in the US is called a tow-truck with a crane or heist in back)
recalls The Sea Mystery (1928) of Freeman Wills Crofts.
SPOILERS. A mystery is how the criminals found electric power in the tunnel
(set forth in Chapter 7, solved in Chapter 9). This anticipates the
mystery of how electric power was supplied in a farm where there was none in
Death Leaves No Card. In both cases, the solution is sound and logical -
but not overwhelmingly surprising or clever.
The Main Murder Plot
After explaining how the crime was done in Chapter 9, barely one-third of the way through the book,
Death in the Tunnel settles down to explaining the other mysteries around the murder,
including who did it and why.
A minor plot flaw. SPOILERS. The victim keeps sending his family and co-workers out of town,
so they won't be around to see anything when he does his mysterious business.
Why didn't he just rent a hotel room in London, and do his business there?
It would have been simpler and cheaper.
Death Leaves No Card
Death Leaves No Card (1939) is an excursion by the author
into the Impossible Crime, one of around eight novels he wrote in this subgenre.
It's a mild and ultimately fairly minor book.
Background
The opening (Chapters 1-3) gives a readable account of the daily routine of a
"bailiff's" wife and daughter, working class people who run a farmhouse for
a well-to-do gentleman farmer. These people are more or less servants.
This section shows Miles Burton's interest in rural life, once again from a working class viewpoint.
And his admiration for women who work.
These opening chapters also show the police investigation of everyone's whereabouts before and during the murder,
something Miles Burton does well here and elsewhere, considered as story telling.
Impossible Crime
Noises witnesses hear around the time of the crime, turn out to be important, showing Burton / Rhode's interest in sounds.
The explanation of the impossible crime is sound enough, but none too creative. SPOILER.
It's in the tradition of "A Chess Problem" in Agatha Christie's
The Big Four (1924) and The Man from Tibet (1938) by Clyde B. Clason.
This was never the most elevated strand of impossible crime ideas to begin with,
perhaps. Rhode adds one intriguing new feature: the fact that the crime takes place at
a farmhouse without electricity, something that makes explaining the situation tougher.
Color and Clothes
Both Geoffrey Maplewood (start of Chapter 1) and his adult nephew Basil Maplewood (end of Chapter 2)
are wearing brightly colored dressing gowns and pajamas.
Such clothes were status symbols among wealthy men.
These clothes stand in contrast to the working class rural environment around them.
They make both men seem unsympathetic.
While these dressing gowns and pajamas are not disguise, they are perhaps linked
to the men's disguises in other Rhode books. They do have a ritual quality,
with their bright color and remoteness from regular garb.
Basil Maplewood's nakedness also suggests ritual aspects, and gives him a phallic dimension.
And Reuben Dukes' crowbar breaking into the locked bathroom, is as phallic as all get-out.
Rhode / Burton is less interested in color imagery, than are other writers like
Ellery Queen. Please see the list of links to my articles on
Color in Mystery Fiction.
Minorities
The I.I.I. section (middle of Chapter 4) involves an account of a minority,
that is certainly tasteless, and sure to give offense.
Death in a Duffle Coat
Mystery Plot
Death in a Duffle Coat (1956) is a mystery about a murder and a disappearance in rural England.
The murder mystery is routine, but the disappearance puzzle is interesting.
This is yet another work by this author, in which the non-murder subplots are much better than
what is purportedly the central murder mystery.
The best parts of the book are concentrated in the opening and the solution (Chapters 1-4, end of 16).
The author does a good job of hiding some clues about the disappearance in the story.
The disappearance also gives him a chance to investigate the local bus and its schedule.
Rhode included a mystery about a disappearing car in Dead Men at the Folly.
SPOILER. The two puzzles are quite different. But both center around a question,
"where did the disappearing person or object go?".
Society
Like other books by its author, Death in a Duffle Coat shows rural Britain as full
of articulate, intelligent people, with strong organizational and practical skills.
The duffle coats are worn by two rural women, while doing outdoor chores.
These are women dressed in masculine clothes. The women are sympathetic: more of the author's
favorable treatment of working women in androgynous costumes.
Like some other Rhode or Burton books, such as Pinehurst, Death in a Duffle Coat
shows unexpectedly high levels of violence erupting in a remote area of peacetime rural Britain.
The police do little to investigate, waiting till an actual murder occurs to pay
much attention. One suspects that today, authorities would investigate such
violent outbreaks much sooner.
Economy
There is the usual stuff about the post-war Decline of the local Manor House.
But pleasantly and more originally, this is counterpointed against an optimistic look at the local economy.
Due to some interesting high tech ideas, the economy is picking up (end of Chapter 3, start of Chapter 4).
Early books by this author often had closed-up or ruined factories in their rural landscape:
see Pinehurst (1930), They Watched by Night (1941).
But in Death in a Duffle Coat, someone is planning to build a factory.
The book's optimism is heartening.
The Murders in Praed Street
Detectives vs Serial Killer
The Murders in Praed Street (1928) might or might not, be
a pioneering detective novel about a serial killer.
If there are earlier examples of such detective stories, they are not well-known.
(There are earlier thriller tales about serial killers, such as
The Lodger. But these are not primarily detective stories.)
Police Inspector Whyland comes up with a couple of good ideas about serial killing,
which will reverberate through later mystery novels on the subject:
- The idea he gets about the killings, while at the movies.
This is a key insight into the structure of serial killings as a mystery.
- His categorizing of the victims. This plays an even bigger role in
Cat of Many Tails (1950) by Ellery Queen.
Whyland's method of getting ideas at the movies, is also interesting.
One wonders what Cognitive Psychologists would say about it.
The Murders in Praed Street also deserves credit for
the ingenious motive that eventually explains the murders (Chapter 19).
Problems
The Murders in Praed Street was unavailable for a long time, except as a rare book.
Now it is out in an inexpensive paperback. That is good. But I found the book disappointing.
Problems:
- The work's biggest problem: its grim tone robbed the book of enjoyability.
In fact, it made me nervous to read it. Admittedly, one could argue that serial killer works
are supposed to be grim.
- Another problem: I agree with Nicholas Fuller that the murderer is very easy to spot.
- And another problem: Dr. Priestly doesn't discover the mysterious motive for the killings
through detective work or reasoning. He simply remembers it as a fact.
This is a second-rate approach, in a detective story.
A key strength of the book: the story telling in the opening is terrific (Chapters 1-7).
The characters come alive. And so does the setting in London's Praed Street and nearby roads.
Learning a Business Skill
Two of the tradesmen have adult children. These young people are learning business skills,
such as being a shorthand typist, or bookkeeping.
Young helpers in a business, like Alf, are learning the trade.
All of this is done seriously, with realism. Much later Rhode's play Sixpennyworth
will burlesque such job newcomers, with a comically unskilled bartender
on his first day on the job. The bartender doesn't learn anything.
Finger Marks
The delightful TV series Murdoch Mysteries, set in Toronto around 1900,
always calls fingerprints "finger marks". It's a running gag in the show.
The Murders in Praed Street (Chapter ), also uses the term "finger marks".
So does Murder at Monk's Barn (chapter 12).
The Davidson Case / Murder at Bratton Grange
The novel known as The Davidson Case (1929) in Britain and
Murder at Bratton Grange in the US, is a mixed bag.
There are a handful of decent chapters (Chapters 4, 9, 22).
But much of the book's storytelling and characterization is dull. It is "dull", in part,
because many chapters do nothing to advance the plot, but merely rehash information we learned before.
Murder Mystery
A negative: I guessed four of the novel's mystery plot "surprises" right away, as soon as John Rhode introduced
the situations he would later twist.
On the plus side, the murder mystery itself has a fairly dramatic, striking and original set-up,
one that seems bafflingly mysterious. It borders on the impossible crime, although it is not quite fully impossible.
The section describing the murder and its discovery (Chapter 4) is the best chapter in the book.
And Dr. Priestley's explanation solving the mystery (Chapter 22) shows some ingenuity.
Even though parts of it seem obvious and easily guessed, they have an overall degree of cleverness.
Aspects of the mystery set-up anticipate a bit, the ambulance sub-plot in Craig Rice's
The Wrong Murder (1940).
More negatives: Some aspects of the mystery puzzle approach cheating. SPOILERS:
- The testimony of the doctor at the inquest is misleading; it reflects very poor quality work on his part.
- The eye-witnesses to the murder set-up on the train and lorry also do a poor and misleading job
with an aspect of their testimony.
All of these borderline-unfair aspects make the murder harder to solve.
SPOILERS. The main mystery puzzle has aspects of the "breakdown of identity" beloved
by the Realist School.
Landscape and Setting
Only occasionally does The Davidson Case display the skill with setting,
that is an asset in Rhode's better work. Best part: the description of a real-life London river neighborhood,
Strand-on-the-Green (Chapter 9). Both the initial description of the area, and
the locals we soon meet in a pub, are vivid and pleasantly detailed.
The river setting gives this a "landscape" aspect, a Rhode strength, even though it is in London,
and not in the British countryside like most of Rhode's other landscapes.
The murder mystery (Chapter 4) involves a simple-but-pleasant rural landscape, in its later stages.
Harassment
The heroine is being sexually harassed by her rotten employer. She does not respond very intelligently,
by today's standards. One can hardly blame an author in 1929 for not having all the answers
on dealing with harassment. But still, this aspect of the book is scrambled, dated and unimpressive.
Background: Technological Research in Business
There is nothing much wrong or offensive, as far as I can tell, with the novel's
depiction of technological research in business.
But it seems superficial, with not much interesting detail.
Technological research in business returns in Death Leaves No Card (last part of Chapter 4).
It is linked there to crooked business machinations.
Pinehurst / Dr. Priestley Investigates
The novel known as Pinehurst (1930) in Britain and
Dr. Priestley Investigates in the US, is minor and not one of Rhode's better books.
It emphasizes thriller elements instead of pure mystery (something that tends to disappoint me,
to alert readers to my personal prejudices).
Pinehurst is the name of the decayed, partly shut-up country house where the action takes place.
A Mysterious Siege
Pinehurst contains a situation found previously in the
Sherlock Holmes stories. A remote country house is under siege from
mysterious forces, that attack it intermittently at night. The siege is connected to the deep dark secrets
of one of the house's inhabitants, and is related to his mysterious past. We the readers do
not know the inhabitant's secret, what his past life was, or the identity and motives of the forces
laying siege, and only learn all these details at the story's end.
In the Holmes tales, this approach works well, giving a story drama and color.
But it is not so enjoyable in Pinehurst. One possible explanation:
making all these details of plot mysterious works well in a 20 page short tale, like the Holmes stories.
But stretched out over a full-length novel like Pinehurst, they can seem annoyingly vague.
Mystery Plot: The Murder
The main murder mystery is poor. SPOILER. A body is found at the start, the apparent accident victim
of a drunk driver. The police, including a smart Scotland Yard man, never think to question
the possibility that someone other than this driver could be the culprit, and that the crime might be a deliberate murder.
When Dr. Priestley sets forth this idea at long last in Chapter 10, the police are shocked, shocked.
This is treated as the ingenious idea of a Great Detective. But it seemed to this reader
to be an obvious possibility from the start. Among other things, it is standard in all detective novels,
to question whether the obvious suspect in a killing is actually the true culprit.
Furthermore, the driver had no connection to the dead man, and no motive for any crime.
Mystery Plot: The Boat
Better is a non-murder subplot, dealing with the boat.
In fact, this subplot is the best thing in Pinehurst.
Rhode books often have a subplot that is better than the murder mystery.
The boat subplot: SPOILERS:
- This plot starts with a good bit of landscape description,
the best in the novel: The arrival of the victim to Pinehurst by boat (start of Chapter 4).
- Then the mystery begins, with a description of odd equipment in the victim's room (Chapter 7).
- It is solved soon (Chapter 9). Once again, Rhode shows good ideas involving equipment and devices.
Observation and lines of sight within a landscape, play a role. These become even more central in
They Watched by Night. Lines of sight
regularly appear in the mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
Rinehart used them before Rhode started publishing detective novels.
Society
The victim is a mean man, who represses his wife and daughter, making their lives miserable.
This perhaps has a feminist subtext, showing oppression of women in the home.
However, there is nothing explicitly feminist.
The 1930 police in this book take drunk driving very seriously.
Drunk driving's ability to cause harm is also stressed.
Another British mystery writer E.R. Punshon will also briefly show
police having negative views on drunk driving in Death Among the Sunbathers (1934) (Chapter 1).
Dead Men at the Folly
Landscape
Dead Men at the Folly (1932) is an inventive mystery, with one of Rhode's settings in an
imagined rural landscape. Such imaginary landscapes are among the best features of Rhode's work.
This one also has some imaginary architecture: the Folly of the title.
The opening of The Milk-Churn Murder has a topography that recalls Rhode's previous Dead Men at the Folly.
Both stories:
- Take place on an old, now-bypassed road, that has had most of its traffic diverted to a new, modern roadway.
- Have a railway, and a railroad repair crew out at the time of the murder.
- Are set in a rural area in the West of England.
- Mention Exeter in Devon as a possible destination for their characters, but neither is set there.
Robbery
Dead Men at the Folly is rich in mystery puzzles. The best of these have to do not with
the murder, but with a robbery subplot. The robbery subplot has three puzzles, all nicely done:
- Who is committing the robberies.
- How they are getting their information about the victims.
- How a car involved with the robberies keeps disappearing.
Rhode's sleuths also come up with a preliminary solution to two of the robbery puzzles
(whodunit, and how they got their inside information on the victims).
This solution turns out to be incorrect and different from the true solution at the end.
But it too shows ingenuity. Such multiple solutions are commendable.
Another mystery puzzle about how a crook gets information about a victim's life
will occur in Vegetable Duck.
SPOILER. The disappearing car and its solution anticipate Hugh Penetcost's
"The Day the Children Vanished" (1958).
Murder Mystery: How-done-it
Both of the first two murders have how-done-it features.
The second murder is especially interesting in its causes and mechanisms.
It anticipates the killing in Death Leaves No Card, although it has differences too.
Murder Mystery: Doubles
Dead Men at the Folly introduces doubles, with two characters who look almost exactly alike.
Rhode employs this in a mystery twist that is decent enough, but far from outstanding.
The doubles aspect is just one feature in a book filled with plot ideas.
Characters and Relationships
The biggest weakness of Dead Men at the Folly is that the book sags in the middle.
We get a long, uncreative digression into the romantic problems of the first victim.
The book also seems unfortunately uncritical of a man's dubious claim that
he has a right to beat up any man he catches cheating with his wife.
Another problem: both the London scenes and the more upper middle class characters
in these sections are duller than the rural landscape and its working class residents.
Leonard Trimmer
I like the young guy Leonard Trimmer who discovers the body (Chapters 1, 2, 3).
He disappears from the story after this, unfortunately:
if they made a movie of Dead Men at the Folly, one suspects his role would be expanded.
He is riding that favorite form of transportation of the Realist School, a motorcycle.
He works for a company involved in trade with Lithuania: trade with Eastern Europe being a recurring theme
in Freeman Wills Crofts and Rhode. Crofts included both motorbiking and
trade with the Baltics in The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922).
Trimmer is wearing practical clothes for his cross-country motorcycle journey: overalls.
Despite this, local Inspector Richings has no trouble seeing that Trimmer is a "smart young city clerk" (Chapter 3).
Trimmer's motorcycle and flashlight are both phallic symbols.
So is the tower he stops at. And the steep hill he rides on.
Men in other Rhode books like phallic disguises. Trimmer is not disguised.
But he is wearing special clothes and displaying phallic symbols.
Trimmer is also traveling for the Christmas holiday: giving his actions a ritual quality.
Inspector Richings
Inspector Richings is the local top policeman. He too is a good character.
Inspector Richings has a sneaky, deceptive, almost con-man side. In this he recalls
Freeman Wills Crofts' star investigator Inspector French.
Both policeman are smooth, friendly acting, but occasionally deceptive.
SPOILERS. Richings' apparent friendliness to Trimmer, is a sneaky way
to get Trimmer's contact information and check up on him.
Trimmer's first view of Richings, is seeing Richings stand by that symbol of
British friendliness and hospitality, a fireplace (Chapter 1).
One suspects that this whole scene has been carefully stage-managed by Richings,
to create a "friendly" impression.
Earlier, in Murder at Monk's Barn (1931), our first view of Constable Burden
tells us of his longing for his fireplace at home, during a cold winter night.
This is a sincere feeling on Burden's part - not a con game.
A Cliche
Dead Men at the Folly (1932) has fun, leading the reader to expect one of the cliches of the genre.
Trimmer himself worries that this cliche will take place (start of Chapter 2).
Such a plot development was long since one of the cliches or bromides of the mystery genre.
One can find it as far back as
A Silent Witness (1914) by R. Austin Freeman.
BIG SPOILERS. We're talking about: "the hero finding a body.
But when he goes to summon a policeman and returns with the cop, the body has vanished."
This has been used countless times in TV crime shows, as well as prose mysteries.
Dead Men at the Folly milks this cliche for a little suspense (start of Chapter 2).
Then deconstructs it. While Leonard Trimmer takes all this seriously,
one suspects that Dead Men at the Folly views these ideas with humor.
The Motor Rally Mystery / Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap
A Rally
The novel known as The Motor Rally Mystery (1933) in Britain and
Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap in the US, is a mystery about an amateur car race.
It is not quite what we today call a "race". The drivers have to proceed through a whole series of British cities,
keeping track of their routes and times.
Ronald A. Knox's The Body in the Silo (1933) also includes
a rally, much simpler, more impromptu, and involving more upper class characters.
The progress of the drivers through various British cities, also recalls the car chases and maneuvers in
R.A.J. Walling's That Dinner at Bardolph's (1927). Those were done
for real, however, moving people around Britain as part of the thriller plot,
rather than as any sort of rally.
The Claverton Mystery / The Claverton Affair
An Overrated Book
The novel known as The Claverton Mystery (1933) in Britain and
The Claverton Affair in the US, depicts mysterious events in a gloomy old mansion.
It is one of Rhode's most overrated works.
Barzun & Taylor in A Catalogue of Crime signal out The Claverton Mystery for special praise:
"The puzzle is sound, the atmosphere menacing in a splendidly gloomy way,
and the treatment of spiritualistic seances above reproach".
I think their claims about the book's mystery puzzle are dead wrong. The mystery plot seems to me to be
1) painfully simple; and 2) full of specific problems, documented below.
A long list of contemporary writers who praised The Claverton Mystery could be constructed.
I am not going to name most of these writers: which would imply some sort of personal attack on their judgment.
This article will instead detail what I see as problems with The Claverton Mystery.
The Claverton Mystery lacks anything that resembles a Background. It tells us little
about Britain or its society or institutions.
Horror
The Claverton Mystery has horror elements: a gloomy mansion, fake seances, a grisly murder method.
Many readers today are horror fans, and tend to praise books with horror aspects highly.
I am not a horror lover. Perhaps my skepticism about the merits of The Claverton Mystery
reflects this.
I found the horror elements to be mildly effective, but nothing special.
(And no, I don't agree with Barzun & Taylor that the "atmosphere" is "splendid".)
Best part: the first seance (second half of Chapter 10).
This leads to unexpected developments: always a welcome feature in a novel.
Dr. Priestley's analysis of the seance has some good ideas too (Chapter 11).
Murder Mystery
The mystery elements in The Claverton Mystery are simpler and and skimpier than in Rhode's best books.
There is a murder mystery, which pretty much makes up the book's entire mystery content.
There are few of the non-murder subplot mystery puzzles that brighten the better works of Rhode,
and other Golden Age writers.
The Claverton Mystery proposes two solutions to its killing: a false solution,
midway through the novel (Chapter 9); and the true solution at the book's end (Chapter 16).
The earlier false solution is simple. But it is also fair and logical, drawing on the medical scientific facts about the crime.
It shows a bit of ingenuity. SPOILER. It has weaknesses though:
It does not feature an "active" murder, but merely a passive acceptance of an accidental death.
This makes it less than a full scale murder plot: the kind of murder plot one expects as the solution in a murder mystery.
The solution at the book's end has problems. SPOILERS. The Claverton Mystery is mainly a "how-done-it",
a murder where the main mystery is to explain how the crime was done. The murder method at the end seems plausible.
But it also seems inconceivable that it would not have been discovered by the famed pathologist who conducts
the autopsy early in the novel (Chapter 6). Sir Alured Faversham is supposed to be one of Britain's top doctors
and forensic experts. How could he miss this? His failure to explore this aspect, despite
Dr. Priestley's repeated pleadings to look for a murder method, seems unbelievable.
It also seems like a cheat, looking at The Claverton Mystery as a murder puzzle.
Just as the poor quality of the doctor's testimony in The Davidson Case
bordered on the unfair, so does the pathologist's poor work in The Claverton Mystery
seem like an unfair basis for a mystery.
BIG SPOILER. The information about the gelatin capsules (Chapter 1) seems to announce their significance.
They made it seem obvious that a capsule had been tampered with.
There are few clues to the identity of the guilty party. SPOILER. The suspect's motive is sound and logical.
This is the main clue to the identity of the killer.
The Will
The will and its mysterious clauses can perhaps be considered as mystery subplots. They are poor.
First subplot: Two heirs are unexpectedly named in the will. The reasons for their inclusion is a mystery, not explained in the will.
I immediately suspected why they are there: it seems like an obvious possibility.
However, it takes Dr. Priestley many chapters to tumble to this fact.
Second subplot: SPOILER. There is a marriage clause in the will. Its motivations are mysterious.
It strongly suggests some deep dark mystery. However, when its motive is eventually explained,
the motive seems inadequate, illogical and harmful to the woman (start of Chapter 13). This subplot doesn't work.
Cityscape
The Claverton Mystery does not include the rural landscapes that are a creative feature of Rhode's best works.
Instead, there is a simple cityscape. It evokes the changing nature of an old London street,
as buildings are torn down, and replaced by modern structures (Chapter 1).
In the tradition-worshipping R. Austin Freeman, such a change would be seen as wholly bad.
However, The Claverton Mystery stresses the gloomy, oppressive nature of the old Claverton mansion.
It is perhaps not so awful that this depressing environment is giving way.
Also, the new buildings being erected seem more interesting than the mansions being torn down.
As is frequently the case in British mystery writers of the early 1930's, modernity
and changes coming to Britain, are symbolized by the movies: here a new cinema building (Chapter 1).
E.R. Punshon's Genius in Murder (1932) praises modernity and the movies,
while J.J. Connington's The Sweepstake Murders (1931) condemns them.
Characters
The suspects are offstage for much of the story. Three of the suspects are briefly seen in a drawing room
(Chapter 1). They are then talked about endlessly, without reappearing for many chapters.
Dr. Priestley takes an instant dislike to them. Admittedly, they come off as an unpleasant lot.
Still, a brief glimpse is hardly fully developed characterization. I found the brief, oblique glimpses
of the characters frustrating. This is not as good an approach as depicting characters in depth.
In their first brief appearance, Dr. Priestley feels the characters are fiercely hostile
to his presence in the mansion. This suggests some hidden, mysterious reason for this hostility.
However, as best as I can tell, no such reason appears, in the rest of the book.
Similarly, in the opening Dr. Priestley is shocked by the decayed appearance of his old friend Claverton.
This too suggests some hidden mystery about problems haunting Claverton. But no such problems emerge.
This hint approaches the dimension of a cheat.
As has been pointed out by reviewers, The Claverton Mystery is unusual in Rhode's work,
in that Dr. Priestley is front-and-center through the whole novel, instead of making brief appearances
as a consultant to Scotland Yard. Further, we are shown Priestley's thought processes and emotions
in detail, throughout the whole novel. In theory, this suggests that The Claverton Mystery
should have better characterization of Priestley than other books. In practice, however,
I didn't enjoy Priestley's characterization in The Claverton Mystery.
I liked him better in Death in the Hopfields and other works, despite his briefer appearance.
Poison for One
Poison for One (1934) is an uneven book, not entirely successful, but with some good parts and ideas.
The story telling in the first two sections (Parts 1 and 2) is good, and makes enjoyable reading.
And there is a clever mystery subplot about a phone call.
But much of the main murder mystery's solution is disappointingly routine.
Background
Part 2 contains an interesting technological and business account,
of a mining and manufacturing operation which the characters run.
This portrait can be considered a mini-Background. It reminds one of the business enterprise in
The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) of Freeman Wills Crofts.
Both of these enterprises get raw materials from Eastern Europe:
the Baltics in The Pit-Prop Syndicate, Albania in Poison for One.
There are pleasant elements of borderline science fiction, in the imaginary, made-up technical details
of the manufacturing in Poison for One. These science fiction aspects play no role in the mystery puzzle
or solution, however, which are strictly realistic.
Movements around Crime Scene
Parts 1 and 2 contain a police investigation of the movements of the characters around the crime scene,
before and during the murder. I have mixed feelings about this. Both here and in Death Leaves No Card,
Rhode's detailed account of the movements is fun to read about. He does this nicely as story telling.
But in both books, the movements also ultimately play only a little role in unravelling the mystery.
They do not contain ingenious hidden patterns, or cleverly faked alibis,
or have much to do with technological methods used in the murder. A simple clue to the killer's identity
does get embedded in these timetables in Poison for One, however.
Mystery Plot: The Phone Call
SPOILERS. Poison for One contains three separate mystery puzzles.
The best of these is the subplot, about the telephone call at 10:15. This starts out by looking simple and straightforward.
Rhode pleasantly complicates this, ultimately giving it baffling dimensions, and then a clever solution.
The phone call enters the mystery as a ringing bell the secretary says he has overheard.
This is an example of the importance of sounds in Rhode.
Mystery Plot: The Murder
Rhode develops a Least Likely Person as the identity of the killer. I found this aspect easy to guess.
The how-done-it, about how the murder was committed, seems only moderately clever to me.
An incorrect guess by the police inspector, towards the end of Part 2,
is actually cleverer than the book's solution at the end.
BIG SPOILERS. William L. DeAndrea in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa
pointed out the numerous evil mechanical devices used in Rhode's solutions.
These devices are fair and legitimate. But they tend not to greatly impress me either.
The mechanical device proposed by Priestley as the killer's weapon,
is fairly close what one suspects most readers will guess, much earlier in the book.
It is more detailed, but not all that surprising.
Death in the Hopfields / The Harvest Murder
Background: London City People Working as Farm Labor
The novel known as Death in the Hopfields (1937) in Britain and
The Harvest Murder in the US, is another of Rhode's books with a rural setting.
The story opens with a description of a rural region in England that grows hops, and of the vast influx
of field workers during harvest time (first half of Chapter 1). It is unclear in England where the tale is set,
but it might be the county of Kent, a region known both for hop growing and proximity to London, where most of the field workers come from.
I have never read of another farm crop, where the workers come from a large city to work the harvest.
The picture of poor Londoners from the East End coming out to the countryside to work the fields is unusual.
Much of the book is very low key. An entire chapter (Chapter 3) is devoted to the local pub,
and its arrangements for handling the big crowds of field workers during harvest time.
This has nothing to do with the mystery, and not much to do with the actual hop harvest either.
It is an odd look back at how businesses dealt with crowds, way back when.
It is not brilliant, but the fact is I don't recall anything like it in other mystery novels,
and one has to admit that it is at least "different".
There is a further detailed look at the harvesters getting their food (first half of Chapter 5).
Most of the characters in these sections are working class. They form a "group portrait" of working class British of the era.
The organizational challenges of hosting field workers in a rural region in Death in the Hopfields,
anticipate the World War II hosting of large scale enterprises in the countryside in
They Watched by Night - although They Watched by Night centers on security rather than
providing food and drink. More distantly, it evokes a complex event staged by country people
themselves in Night Exercise.
The city people in working as migrant harvesters in Death in the Hopfields are very different
from their rural hosts. Similarly, the wartime technical expert workers in They Watched by Night
are nerd-like, and drastically different from the traditional British Army. Rhode seems sympathetic
to these people with different ways, in both novels.
Nick Fuller's article on
Death in the Hopfields
reprints 1930's reviews, including an interesting one by E.R. Punshon.
Punshon praises both the hopfield and pub backgrounds.
Food and Drink: Links to Vegetable Duck
The look at providing the proletarian field workers with food and drink in Death in the Hopfields,
can be contrasted with the look at preparing and serving food in a middle class household in
Vegetable Duck. Both novels have much about the food or drink preparers themselves,
the pub workers in Death in the Hopfields, the maid Ellen in Vegetable Duck.
Both works are richly detailed, preserving like a time capsule the concrete processes of
drink and food handling and serving.
Both books also look at agriculture, showing food being grown:
- Death in the Hopfields shows hops being grown and processed.
- Vegetable Duck shows what the British call "vegetable marrows" and Americans call "squashes" being raised.
The opening of The Milk-Churn Murder shows us a bit about a rural dairy, although it is
less informative and detailed than Death in the Hopfields or Vegetable Duck.
The Fire Mystery
The best part of the book is a subplot about a mysterious fire. This forms what is nearly a separate short story
(Chapters 7-9). This is interesting both for its description of how firefighting worked
in rural England of the day, and also for its later investigation as a mystery. In the mystery puzzle,
both noises and the sense of smell play a role. These chapters also contain an in-depth
look at the hop harvest, completing the picture sketched out in Chapter 1.
Murder Mystery: Strengths and Weaknesses
The main murder-and-theft mystery puzzle is ordinary: something dull and uncreative that takes up much of the book.
The endless padding devoted to this mystery harms a book, which otherwise has much interest.
SPOILERS. The police take forever to suspect a missing man is dead,
while readers immediately guess this, in part because of the title of the book!
SPOILERS. A much better puzzle then briefly emerges.
This new puzzle revolves around that R. Austin Freeman subject, the disposal of the corpse.
When Dr. Priestley knows how the body was disposed of, he then can directly deduce who did the murder.
This solution is simple, but logically sound (Chapter 17).
Had Rhode included only the good parts of Death in the Hopfields, and left out the padding,
he would have had a first rate novella. Instead, these creative sections are embedded in
a long book that has many routine episodes.
Architecture
British mystery novels set in farming regions tend to take an interest in farm architecture, especially
tall, unusual buildings used to process plants:
- The silo in Ronald A. Knox's The Body in the Silo (1933),
- The oast houses used to dry hops in Rhode's Death in the Hopfields (1937),
- The drying-shed used to dry pyrethrum flowers used as insecticides in
Elspeth Huxley's The African Poison Murders (1939).
Huxley explicitly says these are inspired by oast houses in Kent.
I've seen hops in botanical gardens, but have never visited a hop field or an oast house. Readers might increase their enjoyment
of Death in the Hopfields by doing some Internet searches on these terms. The oast houses are beautiful and unusual.
A photograph of oast houses was on the original book jacket of Death in the Hopfields.
They Watched by Night / Signal For Death
World War II Britain
The novel known as They Watched by Night (1941) in Britain and
Signal For Death in the US, is a mystery with a World War II Britain setting.
Its heroes are looking for lights at night in a blacked-out region of rural Britain;
its villain is a pro-Nazi traitor who is signaling Nazi warplanes where to bomb.
Aside from a vividly written opening (Chapter 1 to start of Chapter 6), it seems to be one of Rhode's lesser books.
As R.E. Faust points out in his
review
at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, They Watched by Night is better in its depiction of war-time Britain,
than in its mystery elements. The opening offers a detailed picture of the many security forces
operating in a rural British town. They are surprisingly varied.
There are also lively glimpses of a technological project by the British Armed Forces.
These are in keeping with Rhodes' and the Realist School's interest in technology.
Unfortunately, this material drops out of the novel after the opening. They Watched by Night
gets some comedy out of the technicians' drastic contrast in appearance, grooming and attitude
from the traditional military types around them. These technicians are clearly what we would today call "nerds",
although the book never uses that term, which wasn't invented till decades later.
The book also makes clear the technicians' skill, determination and patriotism.
Treason and Politics
The detective hero immediately rejects the idea that the traitor will be someone of German descent.
At the end, the traitor turns out to be a pro-Nazi ideologue, rather than someone ethnically German.
Like all the suspects in the book, the traitor is an upper class English gentleman.
Politically, this is quite different from Death of a Train (1947) by Freeman Wills Crofts,
which suggests all World War II English traitors were of German descent.
Do Not Disturb (1943) by Helen McCloy suggests that the right-wing
politics of rich upper class Americans makes them likely to be Nazi sympathizers and traitors.
Rhode doesn't go this far, or make any critique of the British upper classes' politics.
But he definitely holds open the possibility that there are Nazi ideologues lurking in Britain's
upper classes.
Undercover Work
Two of the sleuths in They Watched by Night take on undercover roles, in the opening chapters.
These make for entertaining reading. The undercover roles are fairly mild in scope:
they are just among the honest villagers, and do not involve infiltrating bad guys.
Nor do they actually lead to disguise, a subject that pops up in some other Rhode novels.
One wonders if British mystery writers associated undercover roles for the police with
wartime counter-espionage work.
Crofts' Death of a Train also has police taking on undercover assignments in wartime Britain.
Landscape
The opening offers one of Rhode's skilled portraits of a rural village landscape.
Light
There are lyrical portraits of what lights in a night-time village look like
to an observer. These passages reflect Rhode's ongoing interest in describing light.
Another favorite Rhode subject, fog, gets a lyrical treatment in the description of
the night mist (start of Chapter 6).
They Watched by Night is full of a favorite Rhode device, the flashlight.
The sleuth solves a small-but-creditable mystery subplot about flashlights (start of Chapter 6).
The night-watchers studying the lights in They Watched by Night
also reflect Rhode's fascination with nocturnal labor.
Mystery Plots
Lack of logical connections are a problem:
- The murder that takes place turns out to have nothing to do with the traitor's signaling activities.
This is really stretching coincidence.
- The method of signaling revealed by Dr. Priestley at the end is technologically ingenious (Chapter 13).
But it has little to do with any mystery puzzle in the book. It does not shed any new light on hidden
aspects of what has transpired before.
Other problems: the murder mystery has little interest or creativity. SPOILER. As is easy to guess,
it involves one of Rhode's technological devices. The device shows Rhode's technical skill,
but it is not that interesting. As a mystery about a fire in a rural England setting, it recalls
a better Rhode novel, Death in the Hopfields. Both have a somewhat similar solution,
although I think the ideas in Death in the Hopfields are more creative.
The location where the signaling is taking place is somewhat startling and even a bit surreal (Chapter 13).
But is also implausible. SPOILER. The location might well be invisible to the town's main observation posts.
But it would be highly visible to neighbors, travelers on nearby roads, etc.
These people would have long since raised alarms, spread reports of light, etc.
The book does not consider this. Earlier, the sleuth came up with a duller,
but far more plausible, potential locale for the signaling (Chapter 5).
A clue to the identity of the traitor, involves the passing on of information,
and what people knew and did not know. A differently structured puzzle about the flow of information
will occur in Vegetable Duck.
In general, the mystery about the traitor signaling is consistently better than the murder mystery.
The signaling plot benefits from vivid description of the sleuth's night-watch activities,
an inventive-if-implausible locale for the signaling, and Dr. Priestley's technological ideas about the signaling.
These aren't perfect, but they are creditable. By contrast, the murder mystery is second rate.
Captain Brockhurst
A subplot involves Captain Brockhurst. Brockhurst is my favorite character in the novel.
Although a retired military officer, Brockhurst is posed halfway between the strict military types
and the techno-nerds. His low key, working-officer portrayal offers a sly comic commentary on
the excessive attitude of the traditional military man Major Matfield.
There is a mystery sub-plot about the (separate) mysterious activities in which Brockhurst
and Mr. Pembury are engaged. This has a clever solution (Chapter 13).
One wonders if Brockhurst is in part an autobiographical portrait of the author.
Night Exercise / Dead of the Night
The novel known as Night Exercise (1942) in Britain and
Dead of the Night in the US is one of Rhode's few non-series
mystery novels.
Background and Landscape
Like R.A.J. Walling,
Rhode's book provides a first hand account of war time Britain.
The opening chapters (1 - 4) vividly describe a Background of
the British Home Guard doing a war exercise in preparation against
a possible Nazi invasion of Britain. These entertaining chapters
show many of Rhode's strengths as a storyteller:
- They take place in a small English town, and we meet many of its local inhabitants,
especially the tradesmen and farmers who are Rhode's favorite people.
- Everybody in the town gets to take on a new role, and
almost a new identity, as part of the war time exercises, and
this often involves new clothes and appearances.
- The local pub plays a central role.
- Many means of transportation in town are employed.
- The landscape of the town and its surrounding countryside
is described in vivid detail, and made the setting of the exercise.
In fact, the town's landscape is the actual subject of the story.
It is looked at in interesting new ways, as part of the war exercise,
as well as being seen in its traditional English usage.
- Most of the opening chapters take place at night, and show Rhode's gift
for describing nocturnal illumination, weather and sounds.
All of this marks the story as very personally Rhode's own.
The fire fighters recall similar countryside fire fighters in Death in the Hopfields.
The simulation of a loss of electric power during the exercise,
recalls the mystery based on a farmhouse without electrical power in
Death Leaves No Card. However, the electrical simulation in
Night Exercise is not involved with the book's mystery plot.
Mystery Plot: A Disappearance
Unfortunately, after this well done first third of the book, the
mystery plot that Rhode propounds is perfunctory. Much of the rest of
the book has little interest, although occasionally the book shows charm.
There are some detective developments about a disappearance of a character
(Chapter 4, end of Chapter 5, solved in Chapter 9). These broadly parallel
the mysterious disappearance of a car in Dead Men at the Folly.
The character in Night Exercise was walking along a path;
the car in Dead Men at the Folly was on a road: both out in the countryside.
The puzzle in in Dead Men at the Folly is a full-fledged impossible crime.
Rhode could easily have made the disappearance in Night Exercise an impossible crime, too -
and it would have made a better mystery. But he choose to give a non-impossible alternate explanation
(a maze of hedges and ditches through which the character could have wandered off,
is mentioned at the end of Chapter 5).
SPOILERS. This alternative explanation shows the Golden Age interest in
landscape and architecture. So does the real solution, when it is revealed.
A Self-Portrait?
The central character of the story, Major Ledbury, is both an
Army officer and a novelist. In this he resembles Rhode himself,
who followed both professions. Ledbury even has the same rank
as Rhode, that of Major. One wonders if the portrait has a degree
of autobiography. Rhode would have been 57 in 1941, when the novel
is apparently set: exactly the same as Major Ledbury in the book.
Certainly Rhode's inside knowledge of Army work gives an extra
edge of detail to the depiction of the war games in the novel.
Also a bit unusual: the way that Ledbury's wife and children are
briefly and proudly alluded to in the novel (Chapter 8), but never
put in an on-stage appearance. If their glowing descriptions are
intended as a tribute to Rhode's own family, this would make sense.
Rhode would feel comfortable praising them. But he would not want
to exploit them by dragging them on stage as characters in the
story.
Death Invades the Meeting
Death Invades the Meeting (1944) is one of Rhodes' poorest books.
It suffers from relentlessly dull storytelling.
There is little of interest in its characters or setting,
a provincial organization that is conducting a low-level meeting.
Mystery Plot
SPOILER. The mystery plot and solution rework material from earlier Rhodes books,
such as the second killing in Dead Men at the Folly, and especially Death Leaves No Card.
The solution involves another of Rhodes' "murderous devices":
something that most readers will guess right away.
This particular device is different in detail from those in earlier Rhodes books,
a point in its favor. Unfortunately, this gizmo approaches the ridiculous.
It can be considered as Camp, or something nearing self-parody for Rhodes.
It seems to burlesque that cliche of the British Mystery, "the body in the library".
The gizmo is probably the best part of Death Invades the Meeting,
silly if minor fun. It would have been serviceable as a plot device,
if Rhodes had used it in a short story, one with better storytelling
and a sense of humor.
Vegetable Duck / Too Many Suspects
The novel known as Vegetable Duck (1944) in Britain and
Too Many Suspects in the US, is a poisoning mystery.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Vegetable Duck is a lightly charming book, with a number of virtues:
- It has three small puzzles that are nicely solved.
- It shows sound detective work,
with the sleuths figuring out the solution through a mass of step-by-step investigations,
that stretch through the entire book. This detective work is usually admirably logical.
- Both the crime and its detection have been imagined with a pleasant profusion of detail.
- Aspects of the case, especially the detective work, involve science, always a plus in a mystery.
- Vegetable Duck is a pure detective story, that sticks to a crime and its investigation,
never degenerating into a thriller or soap opera.
On the negative side, Vegetable Duck has limitations, some serious enough
to prevent it from being a work of the first rank:
- The murder mystery as a whole is not built around a major puzzle idea.
So no one can claim it is the sort of brilliant puzzle mystery found in
Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton or other puzzle masters.
- While Scotland Yard eventually gathers sound evidence against the killer,
there is no way for the reader to deduce the identity of the killer.
- One aspect aside, the poisoning mystery too lacks any sort of puzzle that can be solved by the reader
through clues. The reader can only watch while Scotland Yard gathers more and more evidence.
- The scientific detective work done by the police to investigate the poisoning, is logical,
but lacks elements of surprise, startling ingenuity, or technological innovation. It is pretty close to what
most readers would have done, had they been put in charge of such an investigation.
- The characters and settings are fairly bland and typical of everyday life,
although the characters have indeed been consistently imagined.
Food Preparation: A Background?
There is no conventional Background in Vegetable Duck,
in the sense of a look inside some institution or business.
We do learn something about how a middle class household of the era bought, prepared and served food,
right down the various kinds of plates and serving dishes used.
The maid Ellen's testimony about this is often interesting. Perhaps this information on
"home use of food" can be considered as a small Background of sorts.
An earlier Rhode novel about preparing food is Death in the Hopfields.
Its review above makes a detailed comparison to Vegetable Duck.
Puzzles: The Letter
The subplot about the letter is a clever puzzle mystery. It has a full complement of mystery
characteristics: a baffling situation that initially seems impossible,
detective work that reveals interesting aspects about the mystery, but doesn't solve it;
a solution that is surprising, logical and based on clues.
This subplot is a full, "fair play" mystery, in other words.
The letter subplot in Vegetable Duck is comparable in broad terms,
to the phone call subplot in Poison for One. Both are ingenious mysteries
about means of communication; neither is directly linked to the main murder mysteries in their books.
The Other Two Puzzles
SPOILERS.
The puzzle about how the poison was introduced into the food is mildly clever. (It gets solved in the first half of Chapter 12.)
As both Nick Fuller and R.E. Faust point out in their
reviews
at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki,
Rhode's puzzle and solution are variations on R. Austin Freeman's
earlier short story "Rex v. Burnaby". Rhode's variation is enough to make his idea legitimately original,
but it is still fairly close to Freeman.
The other puzzle is how the killer could have learned enough about routine in the victim's flat,
to have planned the crime. This gets a good explanation (Chapters 21, 22).
Another Rhode with a mystery puzzle about how crooks learned enough about a victim is Dead Men at the Folly.
Architecture
The delivery elevator at the flats, is an example of the Golden Age's interest in
unusual architecture (Chapters 6 (first part), 9, 10).
SPOILER. This elevator and its use to deliver food also play a role in the mystery plot.
This allow the range of possible suspects to be enlarged dramatically.
Its use means that the killer was not necessarily in the flat.
Society
The victim and her husband have inherited money, and live lives of leisure.
In many British detective novels of the era, the leisure class is depicted as full of
people of breeding and culture. Not this couple. They are about as vulgar and vice-driven a pair as could be found.
It is a negative portrait of Britain's leisure class.
In some ways the maid Ellen is the most sympathetic person in the book,
hard working and highly observant. But she is also treated as a comic figure,
an overwhelming chatterbox. It is a somewhat mixed portrait, of a working class woman.
The Titles
Vegetable Duck is a better title for the novel. It is unusual and intriguing.
Too Many Suspects is a poor title: the mystery in the novel actually has only a few suspects!
One might conjecture that Too Many Suspects was slapped on the book by a publisher,
who hoped to emphasize to potential readers that the book was a murder mystery.
Death in Harley Street
Death in Harley Street (1947) is a mystery with a medical setting,
Harley Street being the traditional office location of high-prestige London doctors.
An Unconventional Mystery
Death in Harley Street has an unusual, non-standard construction for a mystery.
The facts of the case are seemingly not in dispute. But they seem poorly motivated:
it is apparently impossible to understand why the victim acted as he did.
Coming up with a logical explanation of these actions, or motive for them, seems to constitute the mystery.
Quite a few mystery lovers seem to prize mysteries highly, that offer formal variants
on the standard construction of detective fiction. By contrast, I tend to have mixed feelings
about such works. I try to welcome innovation. It certainly takes imagination to create
variations on the standard mystery paradigm. Rhode in Death in Harley Street,
and other writers who offer such works, deserve credit for new approaches.
But it is also easy to overvalue such tales. It is going too far, as some readers do,
to automatically regard any work that varies mystery paradigms as a "masterpiece" or "classic".
On the negative side, the puzzle and solution in Death in Harley Street are fairly simple.
Mystery Plot
SPOILER. The mystery plot and solution bear a broad family resemblance to
The Door Between (1937) by Ellery Queen,
and the final thriller-twist in "After Dinner Story" (1938) by Cornell Woolrich.
However, Rhode's over-all puzzle is different from either.
The Secret Meeting
The Secret Meeting (1951) is a very poor mystery-and-intrigue novel. It is not recommended.
Mystery Plot
I thought it was easy to figure out how the criminals got into the locked room.
This idea is not at all original or creative.
But the explanation has an unusual extra idea that is new.
SPOILER. The new idea is linked to ruins left over from World War II bombing.
This idea is perhaps linked to the interest in architecture in Golden Age mysteries.
Anti-Semitism?
The Secret Meeting introduces Jewish characters in its opening (Chapters 1, first half of 2).
The treatment of these characters is mixed. At the end of the opening, Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn concludes that he
"was beginning to acquire a liking for Steinie. He was certainly bright and there was nothing in any way furtive about his manner."
The Jewish characters largely disappear after this point, and one can perhaps take this as his final judgement on the subject.
But earlier views of these characters are full of anti-Semitism and its stereotypes:
- The police instantly suspect these Jews are guilty, despite the lack of any evidence to tie them to the crime
(the Jews are simply the crooks' landlords).
The police clearly associate Jewishness with criminality. This is perhaps just the point of view of these policemen,
rather than that of the novel or its author. But no one ever contradicts this idea, or suggests alternative views.
- The police make gibes at Solomon, calling him money grubbing.
Actually, most businesses in Britain and elsewhere are run to make a profit, and both Jews and non-Jews try to make money.
But Jimmy is "scornful" of Solomon's sole concern that his tenant paid his rent.
Steinie is depicted as upset that he didn't manage to charge a customer more.
- Steinie talks to the police in a "servile tone".
The Jews make hand gestures, have "guttural voices" and "gabble" in Yiddish.
Jimmy is unsympathetic to Solomon's shock at seeing the corpse.
Murder at Monk's Barn
Murder at Monk's Barn (1931) is the first of four novels the author wrote under the name "Cecil Waye".
It's a good mystery.
Rhode Subjects
Murder at Monk's Barn has features that echo the author's traditions:
- It takes place in an interesting rural area.
- There is a detailed landscape, albeit one a little smaller than in some of the author's books.
- Architecture of buildings plays a role.
- "Lines of sight" are present.
- The police learn about the crime through sound: in this case, the sound of a shot.
- A factory is part of the rural scene.
- Electric power is linked to the factory.
- A man is murdered while shaving, anticipating the victim doing
his morning cleanup in a bathroom in Death Leaves No Card.
All of these elements give both charm and substance to the mystery.
Detective
Murder at Monk's Barn is atypical in having a professional detective who is also a woman.
She is a careful reasoner, good at logic.
We learn her thinking throughout, in the Freeman Wills Crofts tradition.
The admirable detective gives the book a feminist aspect.
The Elusive Bullet: a short story
Even at his best, John Rhode's Dr. Priestley short tales are pretty mild stuff.
The best I have read is "The Elusive Bullet" (1931).
This story is plainly inspired by Freeman's
"The Blue Sequin" (1908), with perhaps a dash of
Samuel Hopkins Adams' "The One Best Bet" (1911) thrown in.
"The Elusive Bullet" and "The Purple Line" (1950), are unusual in that
they are solved through mathematical analysis. This is rare in mystery fiction;
it is consistent with Dr. Priestley being a mathematician.
(Ellery Queen regularly used mathematics.
Please see also my list of
Mathematics in Ellery Queen.)
"The Elusive Bullet" involves a complex country landscape: a Rhode tradition.
The details of the landscape enable the mystery plot's solution.
The landscape includes both natural and technological features: also common in Rhode.
Soldiers operating in the countryside play a role. This anticipates
Rhode's World War II era stories set in rural England.
"The Elusive Bullet" is reprinted in the anthology
Bodies from the Library (2018), edited by expert mystery historian Tony Medawar.
This anthology is also known as Bodies from the Library 1.
The Yellow Sphere: a short story
"The Yellow Sphere" (1938) is a kind of inverted mystery tale.
It is vivid in its story telling and detail.
"The Yellow Sphere" is reprinted in the anthology
Bodies from the Library 3 (2020), edited by expert mystery historian Tony Medawar.
The title "The Yellow Sphere" anticipates that of Rhode's later "The Purple Line".
Both titles begin with a color. Then end with a geometrical figure.
The plot of "The Yellow Sphere" is grounded in the architecture of its locales.
The landscape around these locales also plays a bit of a role.
This interest in architecture recalls both Rhode specifically
and the Golden Age as a whole.
I'm viewing the boat and its layout as a kind on "architecture" in this tale.
SPOILERS. What eventually happens to this architecture is imaginative
and unusual in detective fiction as a whole.
SPOILERS. The sphere of the title eventually becomes an environmental measuring device.
In this it anticipates the title device in "The Purple Line".
This measuring device approach in "The Yellow Sphere" is terrifically imagined.
An Inverted Mystery
SPOILERS in this section. "The Yellow Sphere" has a different construction from many inverted mysteries.
Typically, the first part of an inverted mystery shows a man committing a crime.
The second half shows a mistake he made that lets him get caught by the detective.
The first part of "The Yellow Sphere" shows a man setting a crime trap in motion: fairly standard.
But the second half shows how a mistake allows the victim to escape.
This second half is very different from the second half of a typical inverted,
where a "mistake gets the criminal caught". I like this approach in "The Yellow Sphere".
"The Yellow Sphere" differs in another way from from many inverted mysteries.
Most inverteds end with the authorities learning the identity of the villain,
finding evidence against him, and moving to arrest him for his crime.
But in "The Yellow Sphere" there are no police or other authorities,
and they learn nothing about who did the crime.
We can guess, one supposes, that the police won't have much
trouble bringing the crime home to the bad guy. But this is not discussed in the tale.
I've called the villain in this and other inverteds "him".
In actual fact, most inverted mysteries from the pre-1950 era have male villains.
I don't know why.
The Purple Line: a short story
"The Purple Line" (1950) is a well-done and compactly told detective story.
Despite its short length, it has several well-drawn characters.
"The Purple Line" has a number of features in common with Death Leaves No Card (1939):
- A house that is out of an urban area, and "off the grid", with no telephone connection.
- A brief description of the rooms of the house.
- A corpse found near the house's water-container technology:
an outdoor water barrel in "The Purple Line",
a bathroom with bathtub in Death Leaves No Card.
- A crime scene with surrealist elements.
- Vivid color imagery in the opening sections.
- A character who gets around by bicycle.
- A crime investigated and solved by a police Inspector.
He gets no help from any of Rhode's amateur detectives, such as Dr. Priestley or Desmond Merrion.
- A series of events at different times, reviewed during his detective work by the Inspector.
- Working-class witnesses.
- An inheritance from the victim, as a possible motive.
- A meal is prepared.
- Each mystery is set in two imaginary English towns, given made-up names.
The towns are different in the two works. This is fun.
However, the actual mystery plots of the two works are quite different.
Being "off the grid" plays a key role in the mystery plot of Death Leaves No Card.
But it plays no role in the mystery plot of "The Purple Line".
(Note: Rhode does not use the modern term "off the grid", but he clearly understands the concept.)
The alibi plot is simple, and easy to figure out. On the positive side, it is logical and consistent.
But the clue of the "Purple Line" is original.
The barograph shows Rhode's expertise on mechanical objects. For once however,
a mechanical object is not used in a Rhode tale to kill someone!
"The Purple Line" is reprinted in the anthologies
The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990) edited by Patricia Craig, and
The Measure of Malice: Scientific Detection Stories (2020) edited by Martin Edwards.
The Vanishing Diamond: a short story
By contrast, I didn't like "The Vanishing Diamond" (1935).
It is in no way offensive, but lacks inspiration.
Death Travels First
Death Travels First (1940) is a radio play written by Rhode.
Unfortunately it mainly lacks color and inventiveness.
It also suffers from grimness. So I can't recommend it.
It has virtues:
- It's a detective story, albeit a simple one, solidly solved through investigation.
- The concept of a detonator is something I'd never heard of.
Leave it to Rhode to come up with an interesting piece of technology!
- Sound plays a role in the solution. Sound is a perennial Rhode interest.
- The sheer darkness and dimness of the setting, due to a wartime black-out,
plays a role both in the storytelling, and the facts used to solve the mystery.
The first half looks at a family business. It is much less cheerful and optimistic
about such family businesses, than is The Murders in Praed Street.
SPOILERS. Death Travels First is entirely solved by a Rhode series character,
policeman Inspector Jimmy Waghorn. Amateur detectives are not involved.
It's purely a police investigation.
Death Travels First was published in the anthology
Bodies from the Library 6 (2023), edited by expert mystery historian Tony Medawar.
Sixpennyworth
Sixpennyworth is a one-act stage play written by Rhode.
It mixes spy thriller elements, mystery and comedy. There is LOTS of plot.
It is so pleasantly goofy that at times it feels like Rhode is trying to anticipate
the Theater of the Absurd. Recommended!
Sixpennyworth seems to be set in the early 1940's, during the earlier part of World War II.
I have no idea when it was actually written. Rural England during World War II
is the focus of several key Rhode novels. Usually these books are serious in tone.
Sixpennyworth might, in part, be seen as a light comedy burlesque on this subject.
Sixpennyworth takes place entirely in a pub: a favorite locale for British mystery fiction.
However, the walls are covered with exotic weapons: something common in
rich men's studies in mystery fiction, rather than bars. It makes a fusion of two kinds of locales:
a bar, a millionaire's study. SPOILERS. The delightful moment when the lights go off,
is also more common in fiction in a millionaire's mansion, than in a bar.
The story involves some Rhode traditions:
- Sixpennyworth has a bright piece of color imagery: the drink.
- As in some other Rhode mysteries, sound plays a role in informing the detection.
- Electricity is involved with the plot.
- A how-done-it mystery is proposed and solved. SPOILERS.
It is not about the actual killing, but about the closely related "lights going out".
The characters are verbally fluent: something highly desirable in a play.
And many of them have a distinct, individual style of word usage.
The men in the play are different from the women in background.
These differences are structural:
- The three men in the play are figures of mystery. SPOILERS. It takes time to learn who they really are.
By contrast, the four women are much more known to the audience, right from their first appearance.
- The three men are newcomers to the locality. By contrast, three of the four women are locals.
Sixpennyworth was published in the anthology
Bodies from the Library 2 (2019), edited by expert mystery historian Tony Medawar.
Ask a Policeman
Rhode wrote the opening section of The Detection Club's round
robin, Ask a Policeman (1933). This novella length chapter
covers the murder and its initial investigation. It is splendidly
imagined, with much social satire, and a sly sense of humor running
throughout. The satirical element also extends to a spoof of detective
stories, with the Golden Age formula of murder among the social
elite stretched to its absurd breaking point.
The basic setup, the murder of an influential millionaire press baron, evokes
E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913).
It is deliberately absent a solution:
Rhode left that to his Detection Club colleagues, 5 of whom provided
their own solutions to the case.
Anthony Berkeley's is the best of these:
it has some logical analysis, as well as a funny spoof
of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.
Social Types
While many types of social bigwigs get spoofed, at least one major group is absent: the military.
There are no soldiers anywhere in Rhode's chapter. Soldiers are prominent in some other Rhode books.
Both the male secretary Mills and the politician Sir Charles Hope-Fairweather are very well-dressed.
This echoes the well-dressed men in other Rhode mysteries, such as
Leonard Trimmer in Dead Men at the Folly,
and the uncle and nephew in their dressing gowns in Death Leaves No Card.
Mystery Plot: Rhode's Section
Rhode includes a timetable of events surrounding the crime.
It is like a shorter version of the timetable to come in Death Leaves No Card.
The mystery plot is strongly based in architecture.
This is an approach popular in the Golden Age.
However, this also leads to an element of burlesque:
various suspects are hidden in various rooms, like the characters in
an old-fashioned French farce.
The layout of the mansion's grounds also play a role.
The grounds form a small, fairly simple landscape.
Landscapes are a Rhode favorite. Like other Rhode landscapes,
this one includes man-made features: in this case, a driveway, walls and doors.
Sounds often play a role in Rhode's mystery plots.
In Ask a Policeman these include:
- Two crashes heard by the secretary.
- People also hear voices from other rooms.
Like some other of his works, Rhode includes working-class witnesses in his plot.